Once you have a visitor signed up for your email list, it is time to get down to the nitty-gritty of effective email campaigns. Since your recipients likely get upwards of hundreds of emails a day, it’s important that any email campaign that you launch has these four crucial elements to make it successful.
1. Fashion a Captivating Headline
As your recipients scroll through their expansive inbox, your email subject line needs to both capture their attention so they will notice it and captivate their interest so they will open it. Make sure your subject line is honest, short and exciting, but not so flashy that it looks spammy. In spite of what conventional internet wisdom might tell you, it’s okay to use all caps sparingly to attract the attention of your readers to a special event such as a fantastic sale. Additionally, you need to constantly evaluate the effectiveness of your subject lines and change them up frequently to keep them fresh.
2. Carefully Craft Your CTA
Your call to action (CTA) is going to vary, depending on your objectives for your email campaign, but every email you send out should have one. Knowing when to use a hard sell versus a soft sell will make a difference when it comes to keeping readers engaged at the present time as well as over the long term. When your aim is to make a sale with your email, word your CTA more strongly, urging the reader to take action immediately. Dispensing information to the reader, on the other hand, calls for a CTA that is more inviting and softer while guiding your recipient to take the appropriate action.
3. Pepper Your Email With Links and Graphics
Visually-captivating emails are more likely to be read and acted upon. Make sure that your emails contain appropriate graphics. Your company logo, an image of your product or some other method of enticing your readers to connect and engage with you are good graphics to use. Peppering your content with links makes it easy for your recipients to click over to read expanded versions of your content.
Of course, there is a point when your email contains too many graphics. Be mindful that while almost no one uses dial-up anymore, your readers could be checking their email using a mobile device or have some other circumstance that results in your email loading more slowly. Too many links, too, could be a turn-off for the busy reader of today. While there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to knowing the number of links to use per each email, it is safe to say that one link for each sentence is too much. A better ratio might be using one link per each paragraph.
4. Become a Master at Timing
According to research by some of the industry’s leaders, more people open their email after the noon hour with peak times occurring between 2 and 5pm. That being said, people engage with their email more often during the daytime hours when compared to night time. Taking these statistics into consideration and time your emails so they arrive before lunchtime. An additional nugget of information is that most emails tend to be sent during the week. Tuesdays and Thursdays tend to be the busiest days in regards to the highest volume.
Taking these top four elements to a successful email campaign to heart will increase your chances of a conversion. That being said, like many other elements in business today, you will need to constantly tweak these to stay on top of the current trends.
